Next Year in The Navy: Drones, Energy Savings, Tweeting

Share

Next Year in The Navy: Drones, Energy Savings, Tweeting

It's not just about keeping the peace without holding territory. Admiral Gary Roughead, the head of the Navy, followed on his recent naval-strategy speech by releasing a sketch today of what he wants the nation's sailors to focus on in 2011. Among the highlights: more drones; getting energy costs under control; and better use of Facebook.

Roughead recently said he's identified about $28 billion in budgetary fat to cut over the next five years. Cognizant of the belt-tightening times, he says up front in his guidance for 2011 that any future adjustments for the Navy are tied to "our ability to reduce overhead," a top priority for Defense Secretary Robert Gates – and a must for getting the Navy up from 288 ships to the 320 that Roughead wants to see by 2024.

One potential road to cost control: ships and planes that don't need sailors and pilots. "We will pursue unmanned systems as an integrated part of our force," Roughead states, "ensuring that the move to 'unmanned' truly reduces personnel requirements."

Last week, Roughead said that he considered undersea drones a potential "a breakthrough in naval warfare," Inside the Navy reported, if the Navy can get them "to operate for periods of three to four weeks in high-current areas."

But Roughead's guidance doesn't have anything more specific about new drone acquisitions or development. (Watch for that in the Navy's next budget.) Nor is it clear how much money the drones can really save the Navy. Out of an approximately $170 billion budget last year, it spent a mere $3 billion on the Fire Scout, for instance.

Another Roughead priority for his undersea drones is to "develop a long-endurance, safe power source" for them, fitting in with a broader Navy need to reduce "our reliance on fossil fuels." Last week at a Navy energy forum, Roughead and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus talked up the virtues of biofuels and looked forward to cutting petroleum use in half by 2015. It's even introduced a biofuel/petroleum blend to power its F/A-18 Super Hornet jet, what it calls a "Green Hornet."

Whether similar blends will power the rest of the fleet, manned and unmanned, remains to be seen. But the Navy's now looking at fuel costs as a trade-off with everything else the service wants. Rear Adm. Philip Hart Cullom, the Navy's energy chief, recently said that the Navy's dependence on fossil fuels led it to spend over $5 billion on gas in 2008 when global prices spiked, noting the upcharge meant "about $4 billion less of something else that you were not able to buy."

There's a lot of ambition packed into Roughead's 2011 agenda beyond the drones and the cost-cutting. He pledges, for instance, to move the Navy's computer networks "toward a model that is agile, relevant, secure and cost effective," envisioning a "seamless transition" from the Navy's current NMCI network to its desired Next Generation Enterprise Network. But as Danger Room has reported, the service recently inked a $3.3 billion deal just to allow it to cut ties with NMCI and its contractor, Hewlett Packard. Not an auspicious sign for Roughead's plans to, among other things, enhance the navy's new crew of information-sector specialists, the Information Dominance Corps as "an elite cyber force."

One challenge that's not as daunting as using drones or greening the fleet: better tweets. Roughead pats the Navy on the back for using "emerging media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr to reach key audiences and deliver messages in a timely manner through a growing medium." Here, for instance, is an Information Dominance Corps Facebook page. And the Navy's official Twitter feed is one of the livelier mil-twitter accounts.

Next up appears to be bolstered social-media training for sailors: Roughead writes that the way ahead is to "further enhance our use of social media as a tool to reach our Sailors and their families and teach our commands, Sailors and their families to use it responsibly." Loose tweets sink fleets, after all.